In my very humble opinion, once fully understood that URIs don't have
to be resolvable to actual, network retrievable objects, the main problem
seems only one: unique and realiable retrival of the specifications.
Where are the specification kepts? the RFCs are very difficult to get
into (for both sound common sense reasons and political ones as far as
i understand) and internet drafts are forced to fade and deleted ( imho
absurdely, everything should be kept for reference, that's really the
basics, think CVS )
So say you have a URI scheme for some particular domain what do you
do? you hold it up in a web site that you own, rely on its availability,
publish it as draft .. fight to try to make it a RFC.. then eventually you're
going to give up but what happens to those that decided to use your
URI in their semantic web software? All they can do is hope that you
resubmit the Draft and make noise every 6 months.. or something like
that.
I believe that every uri scheme should be kept for reference in some
standardized container. Then it is up to the general consensus and
practice to decide to use it or less. Sandro Hawke came up with an idea
for identifying generic ideas of objects or even persona moods that's
called "taguri" (www.taguri.org) .. the funny part is that i currently
believe in the utility of such a scheme more than he does anymore (last
time we talked he seemed to have been convinced that is a "broken
web architecture".. ) :-) I am writing a sw application and i believe i will
use his scheme.
But what will it happen to it once it has faded as draft? Should i include
the specifications with the release of my software?
Clealy.. consensus alone cannote be trusted, the "system" should
be stronger than that and ensure that rdf documents are readable
and understandalbe well beyond the scope of a single organization
or individual fanning a certain cause.
In a not so unrelated matter..
..basically the same observations could be applied to the general
idea of namespaces as in "location on the web where a document
is kept". where even additional problem pose (has the document
been altered since the rdf was originally written? how can i be
sure "good" on that document rappresent what was originally
supposed to mean?) so i'd feel better with a URI for namespaces
to identiy the "concept" and a date (concepts ARE subject to
mutation, unless the're cristallized as RFCs are..) and of course
many repositories working as archives capable of resolving a
given namespace uri and give you the correct document.
--
Giovanni Tummarello